The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act Of Man Transcript Scene: Title Card: At 8:00 a.m., February 26, 1972, a coal- Interview with survivor waste dam collapsed at the head of a hollow in Logan Intercut with actual County, West Virginia. Over 132 million gallons of Film of the flood moving water and one million tons of sludge barreled along Down the creek the 16 coal mining communities along Buffalo Creek. 125 people were killed, 4,000 were left homeless. Shirley Marcum: Well, at 8:30 sharp my house lifted up off the foundation and floated into my neighbor’s house. The house on the upper side of mine come in, floated in against my house, knocked my house off of its foundation, they both went into my neighbor’s house. And the water, I could not, I could not see over the top of that when it first came in sight! The only warning we had was just a neighbor woman had, uh, spotted it and just pulled in front of our house and hollered, “Run, the dam has broke!”, and then you could hear the roar of it and uh, well, you could see it. I saw my neighbors’ houses leave. I watched them crumble. I seen trees, logs, cars, slate, slush, you name it and it was in that. After we got through to safety and all and turned around, I saw five houses floating down the creek and you could walk on, from one to the other. One house particularly, I don’t know who they were, at the time I didn’t know who they were, but, I found out later, they was the Ballard and Janice Lou Carter family. They was five of them in the house. Filmmaker: They never got out? Shirley: No, They’re all gone. Title Card: An official of the Pittston Company, owners of the dam, stated, “We’re investigating the damage which was caused by the flood, which we believe, of course, was an Act of God.” The dam was simply “incapable of holding the water God poured into it.” – Coal Patrol Survivor: Well, my neighbors cane and woke me and my wife up on Saturday morning. We, I’d got up to fix the fires up and was watching television with my kids and the power went off. And they come a- knockin at the door and hollering and said the dam broke up. Well, we’d we’d been expecting maybe, maybe to hear this word ‘cause we’d stayed up ‘til 2:00 that night watching for a flood ‘cause the waters was high and we were afraid we might get washed out then. But, it still hadn’t dawned on us until we looked around and saw our neighbors running like crazy trying to warn everybody that the dam had broke. Well, we got ready and I ran out on the creek back with a bunch more of the men there. There was about five of us. We’d heard that there was a woman and a baby floating down the creek on a part of a house. Well, we stayed out there until there was no longer any need for us staying there ‘cause the creek was getting up high and they all took off and left me there by myself. My wife had got the kids in the car as was started up waiting on me and it was just as I happened to look up out of 1 the corner of my eye I saw it coming and I took off running for the car and I warned the people down the creek as I went that the water was coming. They wouldn’t believe me and I told them, “Well, look, look out there. You can see a house coming down the creek”, but still they didn’t believe. They was just a few took off and we went on down the road then warning more as we come along to them. Then we got our kids to safety and then we took off back to where we could see what was happening as damage was coming down the creek. We seen eighteen, about fourteen houses destroyed as they hit the bridge, and about five cars, and they was many lives lost but this is the most tragic thing I’ve even seen in my life. I’m sorry that God let me live to see it. The destruction on Buffalo Creek Song: “The Buffalo Creek Flood,” written by Doug Yarrow and Ruth Yarrow, sung by Jack Wright In Logan County where coal is the King, Where the people work hard for most everything, On Buffalo Creek it was cloudy and gray, And the people were rising to meet a new day. The bacon was sizzling, the coffee was poured, But the dam up the holler couldn’t hold any more. And the water raged down, smashed town after town. Homes dashed to pieces and whole families drowned. Interview in an office W.A. Wahler, Consulting Engineer to the Bureau of Mines: In uh, in about 1960 to 1964, there were various efforts made throughout the United states and, uh, including the Appalachian coal area, to clean up the streams, as an environmental improvement act. The dam and refuse pile after the flood And, uh, the so-called coal-water dam, as personified by the Buffalo Creek dam, was invented as a tool for filtering the, uh, solid wastes invented as a tool for filtering the, uh, solid wastes from the stream water, so that the water that was, uh, contaminated with the, uh, coal- waste would come out clean. It was a field invention. Somebody pushed some waste across a stream. The water on the up-stream site was black and the water on the down-stream side was clean and, based on this success, bigger and better, uh, filtration dams were built and they were successful for a number of years and, uh, eventually, uh, this one was big enough to fail in a hazardous manner. Interview in office. Thomas N. Bethell, Research Director, United Mine Workers of America: The Interior Department investigated the fatalities, or investigated the disaster, uh, starting really immediately after, or within a few hours. And three separate reports were produced. Uh, one which was out of the Bureau of Mines and was handled pretty much by the standard Bureau of Mines people who are not particularly skilled in dam construction but they do investigate all mine-related fatal accidents. A second was, uh, produced by a man named Fred Walker who had been the, uh, head of the earth dam section of the Bureau of Reclamation, and was very much an expert in this kind of dam that was used at Buffalo Creek, in other words, a loose, non-impervious kind of dam. And then there was a third investigation by the Geological Survey also headed by experts in this kind of dam construction. The dams and ponds Their reports are, are lengthy, but they all find basically the same the 2 after the flood. same thing which is that the dam simply was not built to impound, successfully, large quantities of water, certainly nothing like 120 or 130 million gallons, which was backed up there on the morning of February 26. All of the reports, uh, uh, express in bureaucratic terms, uh, the real shock that the investigators felt personally as they slowly became aware of just how totally inadequate the dam was and how inevitable it was that it was going to break. (Instrumental music in the background.) Diagrams showing how Narrator: Looking upstream at Buffalo Creek at dams 1, 2, and 3 and The dams collapsed the pools of water backed up behind them on February 1, 1972. February 26, at 6:00 a.m., the water behind dam 3 is rising. Cracks in the dam indicate early signs of distress and weakness. Two hours later at 8:00 a.m., dam 3 begins to fail causing overtopping of dams 2 and 1. Slush from pool 2 is thrown to the left side of dam 2. 8:02 a.m., progressive failure continues to destroy the remaining sections of dam 3. The initial flood water subsides exposing the break in dam 2. 8:03 a.m., dam 3 collapses completely which releases the major flood wave. 8:04 a.m., the flood wave overtops dam 2 and destroys dam 1. 8:05 a.m., the flood waters break through the refuse pile and destroy the first town on Buffalo Creek. The remnants of the dams after the flood. Interview in office. Bethell: Pittston knew twenty-four hours in, in advance that the water was rising, ominously and steadily. The rain was continuing. There was no probability of a let-up. There were no forecasts that it was going to, uh, that, uh, that the situation was going to improve. Jack Kent, the head of strip mining for Pittston in that area, was up at the Footage of dams and dam on an hourly, or more than hourly, basis. He had a measuring ponds. stick in the dam. He could see the water rising. He called, uh, uh, Steve Dasovitch who was the general boss for Pittston in the, in the area, and, uh, expressed his concern that it was going to go. And then, of course, I think the rest I history, but, but Dasovitch, for reasons known only in himself, decided to reassure people down-stream that nothing was going to happen and left the area and was on his way out of the valley when the dam did go.